If you came here hoping to learn some magic spells like “Abracadabra” for marketing, then I may suggest that you learn this magical word. There is only one spell to become a successful marketer i.e., “Creating Value”.
When you focus on creating a valued product rather than dumping anything on your customer, you always reach the customer without hard efforts i.e., natural sales.
Some people already decide on a product for a market and then try to bend the customers in that particular market into buying their product, but that is not how a marketer should think. This scenario is called sales, which is a part of marketing but not marketing. In such cases, the product has a rare chance of selling on its own.
How Does A Product Sell On Its Own?
The product sells on its own (i.e., natural sales happen) when you don’t have an end product when you start a business in a niche. Am I confusing you? So, let me explain it clearly.
Marketing starts before you choose your product and when you decide on your market. Before choosing what product you’re selling, analyse the market or niche you chose. Filter out your competitors and customers in that market.
Analyse customer behaviour and understand “what they want and what they are expecting”.
Read your competitors in that market.
Make a case study and know “what they are selling, how and where they are marketing, what all other services they are giving related to that product?”, and analyse how you can make a difference in that market.
Now create a product or innovate your product to suit the customer’s need. When you bend your product to the necessity of your customers.
That’s when the natural sales happen. You don’t have to brand yourself everywhere your trusted customers will act as your brand ambassador.
This is how marketing should work if you want to make natural sales.
To understand these concepts, we’ll start from the basic law of marketing and how much you grow in your market, never, ever forget the fundamentals.
Why Do The Fundamentals Matter?
“Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying basic fundamentals.”
-Jim Rohn.
So if you want to succeed, you must remember marketing fundamentals and stick to them. However, this not only corresponds with marketing but also to whatever success we are aiming for.
This is where most of the growing digital marketers make mistakes.
When speaking about the fundamentals of digital marketing they only think about SEO, paid ads, social media and all the algorithms but not what they wanted to think about really.
Digital marketing is a way of marketing carried out through digital mediums. So the fundamentals of digital marketing are nothing but the fundamentals of marketing.
The basis of marketing is nothing but sending the right message, to the right people, and at the right time.
Without understanding how to reach or build a conversation with your customer, there is no benefit in spending time and money on SEO, paid ads and social media. Because without knowing how to reach your customers, you won’t be able to find out the target keyword or high-performing keyword. Without the right keywords do you think you will get the right customer for your paid ads?
Take a scenario, where I am an animal and pets Instagram Influencer. I have worked hard and built 1M Instagram followers with my knowledge about pets and animals.
Now let us say Instagram has given a new update which made people lose interest in Instagram, or Instagram has shut down for good. What will happen to my Instagram influence marketing?
It goes down and I have to start from scratch in the next trending social media platform.
But let’s say I have a blog site that was built along with the Instagram profile.
In this case, I don’t have to start from scratch because already some of my Instagram followers would have been following my blog or I can promote my blog to my Instagram followers.
The marketing platform keeps on evolving every day but the way of marketing is just the same.
“A natural response to a natural phenomenon – that is the secret of success in business and management. You will always win if you rely on common sense.”
-Konosuke Matsushita
What Is Traditional Marketing And Digital Marketing?
When I say fundamentals of marketing and digital marketing are the same and digital marketing is nothing but a way of marketing through the digital medium. Some may have a question like “Does that mean traditional marketing is way more powerful than digital marketing?”.
I will say Yes and No.
They both have their own merits. And to understand marketing better, it is best to start with understanding “what is traditional marketing?” and “what is digital marketing?”.
If you have a generic product, then traditional marketing methods like ads on TV, radio and a newspaper are more efficient in reaching out to a large customer base at a cheap cost.
But, if you want to dive deep into understanding your customers, and store and analyse the data then digital marketing is the right fit for you.
So, both traditional and digital marketing are powerful in their unique way and help you to reach out to a generic mass audience or a focused audience.
You have to decide which marketing method is best for selling your product or service.
How To Convert Your Niche To Wealth?
You can convert your niche into wealth using the CATT funnel. which is,
Wealth = n^CATT
Here,
n stands for Niche.
Your success & wealth depends on the niche you choose. So, you need to select a niche where your product or service can address and solve people’s problems.
While choosing a niche for yourself, you need to go narrow. Select the niche and try to go deep and focus on it.
For example: If you choose the digital marketing niche, rather than working on digital marketing for everything. You can narrow your field like digital marketing for real estate or target a single subcategory from digital marketing like SEO or paid ads. So, if you narrow your niche you can produce quality work and attract more customers.
C stands for Content.
Content is the heart of creating value in your niche. You express yourself, present your brand, and build trust with your customer with your content only. So, giving valued content and presenting it accordingly with the marketing platform you use is how you attract your target audience into becoming your trusted customer.
There are different forms of content like images, videos, blog posts, emails, live webinars, comments, and much more through which you can reach out to your audience.
A stands for Attention.
There is a difference between the cuckoo bird singing in a wild forest and singing in a tree near our house. Likewise, writing good content without any attempt to drive attention is like a bird singing in the forest, with no one listening to you.
You need to drive attention to your content. Generate traffic to your content using various means like Social Media, Emails, SEO, Paid Ads and Referrals.
The first T stands for Trust.
Once you drive traffic to your content, you have to build trust with your targeted leads. Without having the trust of your audience, it’s very difficult to encourage them to buy your product or service.
Perform deep marketing where you send personalized communications and try to connect with your audience. Make your leads feel like you are personally talking to them.
The second T stands for Transaction.
Once the trust is built with your audience, then comes the most important thing in the funnel, i.e. converting your leads into customers.
Follow the natural sales method to convert your leads into customers. Don’t just make a phone call to your leads and convince them to buy the product, instead ensure the trust you built with them by selecting the right product or service, with the right message and at the right time that solves their needs or problem.
You can also do other activities like sales calls, live webinars, etc. Without sales, you will not be able to convert your leads into customers.
The CATT funnel is a cycle. Once you complete the transition in the narrow niche you had selected, broaden the niche and continue the cycle.
How Integrated Digital Marketing Helps CATT Funnel?
Most digital marketers forget about the marketing funnel and try generating leads through all their marketing campaigns. They build a strategy to monetize on all the digital platforms, rather than implementing a strategy to combine the platforms and monetize or generate leads.
For better results, build a strategy integrating all the digital marketing platforms in a way that complements one another.
Instead of using paid advertisements to try and sell your product directly, use paid ads to your blog where you can get the people to reach your content and subscribe to your email list. While doing SEO and sharing your blogs on social media, also promote them through the obtained email ids. Then you can convert the audience into leads through your blogs and emails.
Get your audience’s attention to your content rather than forcing them to do transactions directly. Build their trust and make them know you are a trusted brand. So, when you sell your product or service to them, they will refer you to their community without you putting any pressure on them.
This happens only if you have performed the groundwork properly and built their trust rather than focusing on transactions directly in all the campaigns. Here, paid ads are boosting the entire momentum of all your digital marketing campaigns and make people trust your brand.
The CATT funnel is the framework of how an individual user goes through the different stages of marketing and Integrated Digital Marketing is the framework of how you execute the different stages of marketing.
You will have people in all the stages of the funnel all the time because some will be building trust while some will be purchasing your products.
So, once you built trust and completed the transaction. Is the marketing over?
No, you have to provide better service and keep communicating with your customer. So that when you introduce a new service or a product it would be easier to skip the building the trust part. Because they already trust you, and they would be ready to buy from you or refer you to their family and friends.
How Does Communication Work For Marketing?
As I said earlier, Marketing is all about creating value and bending the product or service to the customer’s need. And, when can you know that you are creating valued content, product or service?
You will know when you communicate with your customers. Always try to collect feedback for your service or product that will help you improve your service or product. Sometimes you will get innovative ideas when you communicate with your audience and know what they need.
I Already Have A Brand. Do I Need To Do Personal Branding?
“Personal branding is not about you. It’s about putting your stamp on the value you deliver to others.”
-William Arruda
Having a brand is putting your efforts to reach out to your customers with a different name than yours. In future, that brand name may not represent you if someone had bought that brand.
But, a personal brand is investing your time and money in yourself. No one can buy a personal brand and it always helps you to build “n” number of brands from you.
So while building a brand for your business, also build a personal brand or build a personal brand.
For example, if you work in a well-known hospital for cardiac surgery. You are the surgeon who performs those operations but people will only recognise you because of that hospital. Because the hospital market itself to the people, and not you.
If some other surgeon replaces you in the future, you have to be recognised as the person who worked in the best hospital. But if you had branded yourself as the best cardiac surgeon and created a personal brand, the hospital you work for will be recognised by you.
If you think of starting a new hospital yourself, your hospital will be recognised as the best hospital for cardiac patients because people know you as the best cardiac surgeon.
You learnt how marketing works and what to do to improve your skills in marketing. Put this learning into practice, because there is no better teacher than experience. After successful implementations, create a community and teach that experience to others.
Always Learn, Work and Teach. Because there will always be something new to learn, it is the beauty of marketing.
“Marketing takes a day to learn and a lifetime to master.”
-Philip Kotler
You had started with this blog. Now, don’t stop here. Keep your hunger alive by learning every day until mastering the art of marketing.
To know more about marketing, check digitaldeepak.com.
To learn from the best, visit deepak.me/internapply.
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